This is a common question that gets asked by our clients and it is one that is fairly simple to answer although perhaps people don’t actually realize why.
If I asked you to get guess which one is the search engine you should target then I think you would guess Google.

Of course you are right but let’s have a look at why.

Search Engine Volume

If we think about search engine volume first; globally in 2013 Google accounted for over two thirds of searches. That is a big chunk of the search market! Yahoo and Bing combined had around 29% of searches. You can see that this is a big difference for the number of searches that are coming through each search engine.

Local Variations

There are local variances, for example in the US Google is as high as 81% with Bing around 8.3% and Yahoo just 7.8%.

If you look at Asia Pacific, our region, then Google is much lower at around 55% but then you have to take into account China, where by Google has a 12% share as the search engines are dominated by Baidu which has a whopping 77.1% share.

So by looking at the market share it would make sense to say that Google is the number one target for any business when it comes to search.

Multiple Search Engine Strategies?

Does that mean you have to do separate strategies for the different search engines?

Actually no, if you just focus on SEO for Google you will find that this also helps your rankings in Bing and Yahoo. Yahoo is actually powered by Bing anyway, just for your information.

With Yahoo and Bing they tend to focus more on technical aspects of your website such as keywords, meta tags, title tags and things like that. Google, on the other hand, tends to focus on keywords that help them determine if the right website comes up for the search in question. Google is trying to make websites much more user friendly and thus will rank sites better that offer a better user experience.

Google is the Winner!

Google is more customer focused and continually trying to display results that the end user will benefit from. That alone gives Google the edge and when factoring the search volume statistics then there is just no competition.